Cinema and television
reinforce and legitimize all the types of women’s stereotypes. Women are usually represented in minor and
traditional roles and, doing it in a repetitive way, makes the audience see
them as if they were clung to the past. So the audience sees women’s horizons
limited by the same roles. But there are more and more directresses, so the
women role is taking more importance, although the cinema still presents to the
society a critical vision of women, either being dependent or obviously
independent.
In cinema
it’s hard to find films which treat the coeducation issue openly. As much, they
take it for granted. This happens a lot in North American cinema: the audience
always sees boys and girls together in the classrooms, especially teenagers ¾ except in the colleges of elite, in
which discrimination is continuously supported.
The
critical feminism opposite to the filmography does a critique to the
patriarchal position in cinema and the repetition of static schemes, as the
heteronormativity in the cinematographic narrative representations, apart from
undertaking a questioning to a system structured by the feminine and masculine
roles. These analyses underline the idea of the images and stereotypes that are
assigned to the feminine characters, and highlight the binary game of positive
versus negative representations: mother/prostitute, the bad girl/the good girl…
Cinema is
for the most part controlled by men. Values like power, sex, violence or money
turn out to be legitimized on the screen. We can distinguish between negotiable
and consumable women. The first ones would be pure, while the second ones would
be those who have only use value.
So, the
main feminine roles, according to cinema, are:
This
representation of the woman stereotyped as the wicked one and the seductive
versus the innocent one is reflected in the representation of the vamp woman in
diverse movies. Bette Davis won the title of perverse in The Little Foxes (1941) of William Wyler, another example can be the
‘castrating mother’ of Psycho (1960).
• The woman
who fulfills his social function:
The
function that women fulfill in society; that is, the role of women and the
construction of their representation in relation with a patriarchal system that
classifies her in terms of their function in society: heterosexual, virgin,
wife or mother.
• The woman
object of desire or the ‘fetish woman’:
An "object
of desire" that supports passively the active role of the man.
• The woman
who looks for her prince:
This is the
example of Snow White and other Disney Princesses. The girl’s end is usually
successful, when she ends up with the man; or unsuccessful, when he cheats on
her.
• The
superhero woman:
She disputes the heroisms of the man, such as
Katniss Everdeen in the recent cinema.
So, these
are the different roles adopted by women in cinema. Which one would you say it
is the most frequent?
María Negrillo Macarro
Sources:
jajajaja, well done. You should write more entries!!!
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